Hasta La Ideas

We’ve read on countless occasions how difficult it is to keep a city afloat post-Olympics after those massive crowds leave and all that stuff it constructed for the past decade still remains. It’s certainly not an easy thing to do and in our limited memory, it seems like Turin is the only city to have really pulled it off and come out okay these many years later. Though the case is usually a surprise after the fact, not a cry of warning beforehand. But such is the case with London 2012, which finds one of the chairmen of the review panel for the city’s Olympic Park, Paul Finch, saying the plans as they are now are likely to lead to another embarrassment like the infamous Millennium Dome and has refused to sign off on the layout until things are changed. Here’s a bit:

The design for the [International Broadcast Centre] showed a “paucity of imagination,” it said, which could even blight the Olympic legacy, while more work was needed to improve the “large monolithic block” of the [Main Press Centre].

“Unless there is a fundamental rethink, then people could be forgiven for wondering why sheds have been removed from the Lower Lea Valley in the name of high quality urban regeneration, only to be reinstated at a much larger scale,” it said in a statement.